← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Leveraging CRM Data For Comprehensive SEO Metrics
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello marketers and SEOs. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Val Riley who is the VP of Marketing at Insightly and Unbounce, a set of platforms that support customer relationships, landing page optimization and CRM efforts. Today, Val and I are going to discuss leveraging CRM data for comprehensive SEO efforts. With that, here's my conversation with Val Riley, VP of Marketing at Insightly and Unbounce. Val, welcome to the Voice to Search podcast.
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Val Riley
I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Jordan Cooney
Likewise Val. It's always great to have a marketing leader on. It's insightful not only for the SEO community, but it sounds like the collections of brands at Insightly and Unbounce offer a vast amount of marketing technology and support. Can you tell us a little bit about the mix of brands, how this came to be and what you guys offer in the market?
- [01:37]
Val Riley
Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely a bit of an eclectic mix from the outside, but when you hear the story from the inside, it makes perfect sense. Unbounce, obviously the category leader in landing page builder has been around for a while. Kind of synonymous with landing pages. Unbounce acquired a marketing attribution software a few years ago called Leads rx and really again the same audience selling to marketers and LeadsRx is a full attribution solution. So really multi touch attribution at its finest. And then about seven months ago Unbounce made another acquisition. They acquired Insightly CRM. And so the CRM platform for Insightly has the core CRM functionality, marketing automation, some middleware for connect doing integrations and a service and ticketing act app and built in there. So across all three brands really now we're offering a really go to market platform for go to market teams of mid market companies.
- [02:39]
Jordan Cooney
And when you think about this opportunity, right, this opportunity that, that that spans different disciplines and capabilities, the first thing that comes to mind for me is the data. Like you just got Loads of data. Now that, I mean, any other company would be, would be jealous to have that. Any marketer could leverage to better drive their campaigns and efforts. How are you guys thinking about that piece of the story when it comes to the combination of these companies, the existing data that's in each of them, and then how you guys use that to help your customers?
- [03:16]
Val Riley
Yeah, super insightful of you, Jordan, actually, because when you think about unbounce the landing page solution, landing page builder gives you a lot of visibility into the conversion, right? Did these people come to this page and did they convert? It's a great data point. When you put the CRM data around that now you get a much more comprehensive picture. Right now you can see not only that did that customer convert, but what was their journey post conversion? Did that conversion turn into a, a demo request? Was that demo set? Was there an opportunity created? Did the opportunity close? You know, did it, did it renew a year later? Right. You get that full continuity of data. So really focusing in on the unbounce data, which is hyper focused on conversion rate optimization for that landing page and then putting all the data around it to say, how is this really producing better outcomes for our company and really driving revenue?
- [04:17]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I think that's one of the most unique things. You can go bottom all the way up for the customer. So bottom being like where the event happens, this conversion driver through landing page optimizations, all the way up to the first touch point, whether it be in an email, whether it be through some other marketing campaign, that's a pretty powerful place to be in the go to market space and helps customers tremendously. For today's conversation, we're trying to connect the dots between CRM data and the insights that you can get from that and SEO. And I'd love for you to give our listeners just a little preview into. When we think about a CRM and we think about the data and the insights you can get out of it, what is it that you're looking at? What are the pieces of information about users, about customers, about prospects that you're typically trying to glean out of your CRM CRM data, right?
- [05:15]
Val Riley
And there is so much in there. And you know that expression there's gold in them there hills? Like there is so much gold in your CRM and people don't even realize it. So the first place I say to SEO people, if you want to strike gold, the first here is looking at the closed one opportunities and what are the notes in those opportunities? Because these are people that successfully made it through your sales process and you close them and you've added revenue. Right. So you want to know what words were they using to describe what they were looking for? How did they describe their needs? You know, it's not how we want to sell, it's how they want to buy. And so when you look at the notes from your closed one ops and every CRM has it, and of course it's very easy to access an Insightly CRM, but every CRM has it where your sales rep is taking notes of that engagement and just zeroing in on how they described what they were looking for. Because you know, just for example, like we call Insightly a CRM, some people might call Insightly like a sales ops platform or a customer information platform. Like we don't, some people, sometimes people start the buying process and they don't know exactly what they're looking for or they know what they're looking for, but they don't know what category it's in. And that can give you a lot of opportunity to find keywords that the market is using to describe you, but you might not be using to describe yourself. So I would say the first place you want to dig if you want to use your CRM to optimize SEO is start with those closed one ups, start digging through the notes and seeing how people are describing the journey by which they got to that sales rep. That's super interesting.
- [07:05]
Jordan Cooney
And I think I'm going to venture to guess, but there's a tremendous leverage point that we have today, especially for organizations where they're say more transactional and say their CRM is busier than the average and you have a lot of conversations with customers and the throughput is much higher than the average, maybe say larger enterprise type, type B2B deal in those situations. You have this huge leverage point today with AI to be able to kind of filter through that data and find the trends, find the commonalities. Because at the end of the day I think what you're, what we're looking for is insights and what customers pain points are. What do they really genuinely want from our product, service or solution?
- [07:53]
Val Riley
Yeah, I would just put a little bit of caution flag with the AI because AI does great things. But sometimes if you say to the AI, summarize the notes from this call, maybe there's 17 paragraphs of notes over the course of the 10 calls or touch points your sales rep had with that closed one up, AI is going to do a great job of summarizing that, but that might not be where the gold is. Because AI is going to maybe not use the exact words, they're going to summarize the interaction. But really what I'm saying is you want to find those exact words that the customer used. So AI can be great, don't get me wrong. But in this case, I would say it's absolutely worth you taking the time to. Maybe it's just those first, the notes from the first one or two engagements that might be where that, that answer is. But just be cautious about using AI because you want the buyer's words. You don't want the, the robot's words, right?
- [08:55]
Jordan Cooney
No, no question. I'm 100% with you. And that's a great, great segue to this ask, which is like, once you find those insights, once you find those key terms, those pain points, however, we want to label these elements that we're looking for in the CRM from customers, what do we do with that data? How do we, how do we then validate and build that into our, our SEO campaigns or marketing campaigns at large?
- [09:22]
Val Riley
Right? I mean, you can just take it from there and augment that data first. So like we said, okay, start with the closed one ops, right? That's your first set of goal. The second one is all your ops in general. The ones you won and the ones you lost. Let's check out the notes in those and see what we can glean. And then third, also from your CRM, sometimes if you have the technology, there might be links to recorded calls in your CRM. So not the whole recorded call because I know nobody has that much time, but maybe just the opener where it's the discovery part, right? So now you've got, you're armed with keywords, phrases that the buyer is using from everything you've closed one, every OP that you've opened and, and then you're going into some recorded calls. So you hear the intonation, you hear the, the struggle that the buyer was having when they tried to find you. So you take all of that, right? And then you use that to power your keyword strategy. You know, the idea is, can we turn those words and phrases into action? Can we start building content around them as keywords that we know our market is using, whether that be blog posts, or maybe we're going to take a page and optimize it for the terminology that that customer was using, just, just to put it out there as like, you know, an SEO focused page that is using those keywords and phrases directly. That's when you get the really good insights where you're, you know, you're shifting from volume to value, right? You're really focusing on the words and phrases that the customer is using to discover you and then you're trying to sit on those words and phrases and drive more organic traffic from them.
- [11:13]
Jordan Cooney
I think that's super phenomenal insights and a segue to this next question of how do we then build this phenomenal content? Because looking at the stack of data and insights that you all have, it's not just the topics or the pain points that we want to address but, but then what's the vehicle by which we convey that, how do we message that? And I'm curious to see if you've had have any insights for our listeners around not just the phase of discovery of what is it that the customer really identified with or liked, but then also what's maybe the best type of content or way of communicating that to the prospect or audience that we're trying to reach. And in today's world, you know, content investment is, especially if you're going to be very focused, there's a high stakes investment, right? You're going to really try to get this right on every single attempt. So how do you think about the journey of then defining content types and the ways by which you convey that message to customers?
- [12:22]
Val Riley
I mean it really all depends on what comes out of that discovery that you've made, right? When you're digging through the notes of your opportunities, you find those words and phrases and then as the SEO specialist or as the content marketer, you think what's the best way for me to apply this? And I can give you a really good example. One of our sales reps and, and we're, we're competing the CRM space, right? Which is, you know, by far the, it's the granddaddy of them all. It's the most competitive category. It literally keeps me up at night thinking how, how can we get better? How can we make a dent in, you know, we have some really strong competitors like Salesforce and HubSpot who have put a stake in the ground with CRM content. So it's small avenues that we long tail keywords that we try to infiltrate. So in this example we insightly CRM does particularly well in the manufacturing vertical. And we started seeing notes in some of the closed, the opportunities closed won and closed lost actually with manufacturing companies that really seem to be struggling integrating sales with like fulfillment and accounting. And so a lot of what the sales reps notes were about were ERP integration and insightly happens to have a really good solution for that. We use this middleware called App Connect and we can do, really do a very great, a really good job at ERP integration. And so we were like, okay, well what can we do with this? And we ended up just building some content around the phrase integrate CRM with erp. It was just that simple. So we started use, updated some product pages. We have a page specific to the manufacturing vertical. We got that keyword in there, we did a blog post about it, we got a podcast episode recorded about it. So we're just producing content around this very simple phrase integrate CRM with erp. And you know, it's not a ton of traffic, but the traffic that it gets is really strong. So to the point where we're even talking about putting some dollars behind it, you know, with our paid strategy. So again, just coming out of the sales, the CRM, the salesperson's comments really just drove that whole keyword strategy.
- [14:47]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, that's, that's really phenomenal. And I, and I think it's a, it's a testament of how this, these powerful conversations, right there's, there's clearly a relationship that's been built with that salesperson and that prospect and the process by which that relationship unfolded to becoming a customer can then be a value add into the content creation process and your other marketing efforts across the company. I am curious to take a bend on this if you, if you're willing to do this with me. It's, it's an interesting path because one of the questions that we keep talking about within the SEO world on the show is about brand and what is our brand standing out for. And in your response in your last question, you talked about how Insightly is unique in the marketplace and you've got some 800 pound gorillas in the industry and there's just a, you know, a thousand goldfish in it as well. When it comes to CRMs, how do you use this same data and the same insight to make your brand stand out?
- [15:48]
Val Riley
Yeah, it's a tough question. So I will say being a mid market CRM is a little bit tricky because people don't typically search mid market CRM. Right? Mid market companies sometimes don't even know their mid market. So you know, enterprise CRM, we know we're not going to be able to compete on that keyword. Right? We've got Salesforce, we've got Microsoft Dynamics. Like it's just, it's not, it's not going to be for us. And small business CRM that's something that people will actually search for. But again, there's a lot, it's very crowded in small business, the kind of a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and really low level features. And Insightly is a little more sophisticated than that. So we really can't, we can compete there. We have some great self serve options, but the mid market is really our sweet spot. And so as an SEO professional or a content marketer, you know that no one is searching for mid market CRM. So we tend to lean into verticals quite a bit. So for example, a vertical that we do very well with I mentioned is manufacturing. Right. Or another vertical that we do very well in is businesses that are health care adjacent because Insightly is HIPAA compliant. And so we use the same strategy where for instance, we'll look at healthcare closed one or manufacturing closed one, and then we're going to hyper target those industries with blogs, search, optimized pages, et cetera, to try to make some headway in those verticals. Because again, the mid market is just this sort of open space. And so aligning with verticals has been a lot of what's driven the SEO strategy for Insightly CRM.
- [17:33]
Jordan Cooney
So Val, as we're looking at this vast collection of data, there's so much data that we can leverage here. Are there any other Data points that SEOs should be really mindful of that's in the CRM that we can utilize in our efforts to generate SEO traffic?
- [17:50]
Val Riley
Yeah, absolutely. Another good one is the purchase history. If you could look at a particular customer and see what did they buy and in what order did they buy it, this can give us a lot of insight into upsell and cross sell lanes. You know what we think our upsell and cross sell lanes are versus what they actually are? Because sometimes like for instance, we'll think, oh, they're going to buy X from us and then they're going to buy Y from us and then they typically buy Z from us. We have those. Again, not it's not how we sell, but how they buy. We have to really confirm those biases and make sure that that's actually what's happening. So an SEO person can go into the CRM and really look at purchase history and then see, okay, how should I order my upsell and cross sell content? What is actually happening here? Are we seeing trends in purchase order? Are we seeing trends in the time between purchases that maybe we can shorten? A lot of times with companies, you know, you'll hear, you'll see in the CRM. Hey, we wanted xyz, but they had no idea that our company offered it, you know, and that is just, ugh, like it's crush. Soul crushing, right? Or they wanted this certain feature and they didn't know that we actually had that feature. So looking into purchase history, seeing what feature requests are driving Upsell Cross Selling can be a real clue for the SEO person on how they talk about how the platform can grow with their customers. So it's a little more nuanced than the straight looking at those closed one notes and ops. But there's a lot of gold in there too, really, if you can figure out what's actually happening in Upsell Cross Sell and then use your SEO strategy to accelerate that.
- [19:50]
Jordan Cooney
And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices Search podcast. Thank you to Val Riley, VP of Marketing at Insightly and Unbounce, for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Val, you can find a link to our LinkedIn profile in our show Notes or visit our company websites unbounce.com and insightly.com okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney.
- [20:11]
Ben Jayshab
The founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes, you can contact him on Twitter. His handle is jtkooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jayshab, and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed. We're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it. For today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.